Readers are less and less seen as mere non-writers, the subhuman "other" or flawed derivative of the author; the lack of a pen is ...no longer a shameful mark of secondary status but a positively enabling space, just as within every writer can be seen to lurk, as a repressed but contaminating antithesis, a reader.LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »

Of all cursed places under the sun, where the hungriest soul can hardly pick up a few grains of knowledge, a girls' boarding- scho...ol is the worst. They are called finishing schools, and the name tells accurately what they are. They finish everything but imbecility and weakness, and that they cultivate. They are nicely adapted machines for experimenting on the question, "Into how little space a human being can be crushed?" I have seen some souls so compressed that they would have fitted into a small thimble, and found room to move there--wide room. A woman who has been for many years at one of those places carries the mark of the beast on her till she dies.LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »

While enclosed shopping malls suspended space, time, and weather, Disneyland went one step further and suspended reality. Any geog...raphic, cultural, or mythical location, whether supplied by fictional texts (Tom Sawyer's Island), historical locations (New Orleans Square), or futuristic projections (Space Mountain), could be reconfigured as a setting for entertainment. Shopping malls easily adapted this appropriation of "place" in the creation of a specialized theme environment. In Scottsdale, the Borgata, an open-air shopping mall set down in the flat Arizona desert, reinterprets the medieval Tuscan hill town of San Gimignano with piazza and scaled-down towers (made of real Italian bricks).LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »

Waldo Lydecker: Laura considered me the wisest, the wittiest, the most interesting man she'd ever met. I was in complete accord wi...th her on that point.... She thought me also the kindest, the gentlest, the most sympathetic man in the world.Detective Mark McPherson: Did you agree with her there, too?Waldo Lydecker: McPherson, you won't understand this, but I've tried to become the kindest, gentlest, the most sympathetic man in the world.Detective Mark McPherson: Have any luck?Waldo Lydecker: Let me put it this way: I shall be sincerely sorry to see my neighbor's children devoured by wolves.LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »

I know, it must have been my imagination, but it makes me realize how desperately alone the Earth is. Hanging in space like a spec...k of food floating in the ocean. Sooner or later to be swallowed up by some creature floating by.... Time will tell, Dr. Mason. We can only wait and wonder. Wonder how, wonder when.LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »

The Impressionists dissolved forms. They painted blurry "impressions" of objects modified by changing light and atmospheric condit...ions--drifts of fog, shimmering forest shadows, the glow of gas lamps on rainy streets. Cubists cracked the mirror of art. In their paintings objects open into surrounding space and none has an uninterrupted outline. Parts are broken off, colors bleed into neighboring objects, and translucent facets of space with multiple light sources cut shadows across bounding surfaces. They removed sections of faces and reassembled what remained to create grotesque open forms in defiance of natural appearance.LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »

Oh! I have slipped the surly bonds of earth,And danced the skies on laughter-silvered wings ......And while with silent lifting mind I've trodThe high, untrespassed sanctity of space,Put out my hand and touched the face of God.LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »